The federal investigation that prompted the search of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence on Monday centers on claims that she or her late father may have lied on decades-old immigration paperwork to secure legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship, three people familiar with the matter said.
Omar — a Minnesota Democrat who was born in Somalia and fled civil war there with her family before eventually immigrating to the United States in 1995 — has repeatedly rejected such allegations, which have circulated in conservative media for years. She dismissed them again in a statement Monday as “baseless lies and smear campaigns.”
It is extremely unusual for federal agents to take public investigative actions related to a member of Congress just weeks before an election because doing so could cast a candidate who is not criminally charged in a negative light.
In Omar’s case, the investigation is notable for other reasons as well: It involves long-ago paperwork from when she was a teenager, and Omar is a lawmaker who has frequently been singled out for criticism and vitriolby President Donald Trump and his allies.
The president condemned her again in a social media post Tuesday, after U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told Fox News that her office had launched a separate inquiry into Omar’s financial disclosure forms — a matter that has previously drawn the attention of House Republicans.
“America wants answers, and we want them, NOW!” wrote Trump, mirroring his previous calls for Justice Department investigations of his perceived political enemies.
The immigration-related inquiry, which could result in fraud charges and potentially an attempt by the Justice Department to strip Omar of her citizenship, is based on a renewed look at her immigration history launched earlier this year by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative arm of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the people familiar with the matter said.
The agency had declined to move forward with such a probe years earlier based on similar allegations, said one of the individuals, who is a former immigration official.
That person and a Trump administration official said agents now are especially focused on whether Omar or her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, intentionally misstated her birth date on immigration paperwork so she could be eligible to derive citizenship through him as a minor when he was naturalized in 2000.
Both of them, and a third person familiar with the investigation, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that have not been made public.
Investigators have also scrutinized whether Omar’s father may have purposefully lied or omitted information on his past military service as he sought legal status in the United States before he became a citizen, the Trump administration official said. Mohamed died in 2020.
Both questions are considered key to the investigation because they led to Omar securing her citizenship.
“HSI was just looking at her file top to bottom,” the official said.
Some members of Omar’s family have received grand jury subpoenas tied to the investigation in recent days, according to another person familiar with the matter who also spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss investigative details.
Omar, a frequent Trump critic and outspoken member of the Democratic progressive caucus, dismissed the probe in a statement Monday as the latest attempt by the Trump administration “to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
She declined an interview request Tuesday through her staff.
The Department of Homeland Security and the White House referred requests for comment to the Justice Department. A spokesperson for Justice did not return requests for comment.
Pirro’s separate investigation centers on paperwork Omar filed last year showing she and her husband held assets of between $6 and $30 million, a massive rise in wealth from her previous annual filing.
Omar later revised that paperwork to declare assets between $18,000 to $95,000 and chalked up the earlier filing to an accounting error. A House watchdog voted to dismiss any misconduct allegations against the congresswoman last month.
Pirro’s acknowledgment to Fox that prosecutors were conducting their own investigation again appears at odds with long-standing Justice Department practice to avoid such statements about active candidates before elections.
“It doesn’t matter what the House does,” she said. “We’re looking at the facts. Based on the facts, we’ll follow them wherever they take us.”
The search warrant that Homeland Security agents served on Omar’s residence Monday listed potential charges of conspiracy, immigration fraud and false statements, one person familiar with document said.
The Justice Department could opt to pursue charges along those lines or, if it believes it has proof that Omar’s improperly obtained her citizenship, it could pursue a criminal or civil denaturalization case against her.
Criminal denaturalizations have a 10-year statute of limitations. Civil denaturalizations are not subject to a statute of limitations.
The Justice Department under Trump has made denaturalization cases a priority, filing at least 163 since Trump took office in January 2025, federal officials said. Those include 40 cases since August, as the administration ramps up efforts to strip citizenship from people accused of concealing criminal histories and making false statements on their applications.
But denaturalization cases have been historically rare, with an average of about 11 per year from 1990-2017, according to an analysis from the Migration Policy Institute. Such cases have rarely extended to decades-old actions except in cases tied to serious transnational crimes, including war crimes or genocide.
Omar, in her memoir, has said that she and her family fled Somalia when she was around 8as civil war engulfed the country. She spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp and immigrated to the United States at age 12 in 1995.
She gained citizenship as a minor through the naturalization of her father in 2000. The allegation that Omar was actually 18 at the time of her father’s citizenship application — and therefore ineligible to earn citizenship through her father — gained traction on conservative social media through a viral video posted in 2019.
Shortly afterward, the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library, which maintains biographies of current and former state elected officials, revised Omar’s official birth year in its records from 1981 to 1982, a change that seemed to add momentum to the allegations.
The library told The Washington Post on Tuesday that Omar’s staff had sought that change, saying at the time that it was in the process of correcting Omar’s birth year in various public sources.
Omar, who served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2017 until joining Congress in 2019, also sought to change the birth year in Wikipedia and on the U.S. House of Representatives website, the library said. Omar has repeatedly characterized those requests as an attempt to correct mistakes, not to cover up the truth of her birth year.
David Schmidtke, a reference librarian, told The Post the biographical information on its website is sometimes self-reported by legislators, their staff and family members.
Immigration experts said it is not unusual for refugees, particularly from some African countries, to have issues providing accurate birth records.
In Somalia, where Omar was born, only 6 percent of births were registered with the government, according to a 2020 Somali government report produced in collaboration with the United Nations.
David Nakamura, Alexei Koseff and Razzan Nakhlawi contributed to this report.
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